Website Usability Research
What is usability? For us, usability focuses on how well your website visitors can learn and use your site to achieve their goals. It also refers to how satisfied visitors are with that experience.
Our Approach
Where others use highly scientific usability methods such as tracking eyeballs and clicks to deduce levels of understanding, we use a more qualitative and comprehensive approach to gauge user understanding.
Our usability sessions typically begin with a short interview – what are you expecting from this site? Where do those expectations come from? Tell me about other sites you have used to perform similar tasks? What do you hope to achieve?
Once we open the page for the research participant we ask for initial feedback. In addition to helping guide the design team, the feedback is an educational opportunity for clients to hear their customers talking about their brand in their own words, open and honestly, in front of a third party.
From there, we test a series of online tasks. These tasks may come from your perceived challenges, our understanding of your site’s traffic patterns as told by your Google Analytics history, or our expert and heuristic evaluation of your site’s likely challenges.
Where users identify challenges and problems, we ask for solutions. “How would you make that clear to other people like you? Have you seen another site that does this better?”
The second part of our approach is a purely technical audit and outside the view of users. Does the website work across browsers, versions and devices – not just the one our test subjects are in front of? After all, no motivation in the world can overcome a non-supported browser
Results
Experts argue that testing 5-6 users from your target audience will reveal more than 80% of your website’s challenges. In one day of testing, at your location or one of our arranging, we can accommodate 10-12 user testing sessions. Thinking in terms of audiences, that’s testing your site or testing your intranet for two distinct groups. For example, testing a dog sitting website for both dog owner and dog sitter tasks, or testing a company intranet for employee and vendor tasks.
Our research report will highlight the pain points your website or intranet visitors experience and outline a series of quick hits and strategic changes to improve usability, understanding and satisfaction. We can even put these solutions back in front of the people we tested to gauge feedback before full implementation or launch.
Finally, since your Google Analytics are part of our discovery and research planning, you’ll have solid before and after benchmarks to illustrate how well the implemented changes worked.